Google Admits Glass did not “Have The affect We Hoped For”

Google announced it is fourth-quarter cash Thursday with revenues of $18.10 billion—compared to analyst estimates of $18.46 billion. general, then again, the quest company did strengthen in a few areas, including 12 months-over-yr earnings.

“Google’s full year earnings for 2014 was $sixty six billion, up 19% yr on 12 months,” stated Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google, “and this quarter, our revenue was $18.1 billion, regardless of sturdy currency headwinds.”

The headwinds Pichette are speaking about embrace inconsistent international change charges that price the corporate $541 million greater than the previous quarter. Google also made word of problems getting its newest cellphone, the Nexus 6, to market and real estate write-downs which have been “peculiar”-ly pricey for the quarter.

part of the bad information additionally integrated a three% decline in the moderate price-per-click on 12 months-over-year (additionally down three% from the earlier quarter). that means per-ad costs are reducing. the excellent news is the collection of ad clicks are up, so the company remains to be growing its reach and people are still clicking advertisements—a core piece of Google’s business.

One attention-grabbing piece of data that got here to mild was once the admission that Google Glass—the corporate’s augmented fact headset—didn’t “have the affect we hoped for.” A nugget from Pichette provides somewhat more clarity to the mission which simply “graduated” from Google X Labs:

“In other cases, when teams are not in a position to hit hurdles, but we predict there may be nonetheless a lot of promise, we may ask them to take a pause and take the time to reset their strategy, as we recently did within the case of Glass. And in those circumstances where a project doesn’t have the impact we hoped for, we do take the cruel calls. We make the decision to cancel them, and you have got considered us do that time and time again.”

On January 19th, Google announced that its Glass wearable tool would turn out to be a standalone challenge and continue to be led by way of Ivy Ross. It was also introduced that Ross would now report to Nest Labs’ Tony Fadell, who would take on overseeing Glass. It sounded vaguely promising at the time, however with these new comments from Pichette, it seems Glass could also be getting utterly retooled—if it ever makes it again.